You cannot help but think about how you would handle the repression, guilt, and heat that befall the characters through Daniel Minahan’s sumptuously shot drama On Swift Horses. This story is about how we hide important deeds from those we love as we realize that you cannot win if you do not gamble or put a lot on the line. Featuring a curious performance from Daisy Edgar-Jones, Minahan’s film reveals the cracks and flaws in the standard American dream.
After Will Poulter’s Lee returns from fighting in Korea, he is eager to begin a more exciting life with Edgar-Jones’ Muriel. After finally accepting his marriage proposal, he wants to sell her mother’s house and head out west to California. Before ther big move, they are visited by Lee’s brother, Julius, played by Jacob Elordi. “He has passions of his own,” Lee tells Muriel one night. “He’s just not like us.”
Julius visits Las Vegas and takes a job in surveillance at a casino after telling the owners that he knows how a criminal’s mind work. For a wandering, brooding soul like Julius, it seems like a plumb gig. He can spy on excited honeymooners or drunk businessmen in a shadowy loft and spend time with Diego Calva’s Henry. Their affair is secretive and sweaty, confined to dumpy, tacky motel rooms, and Henry is more realistic than his dreamboat counterpart. “Look at you…look at me…when we want something, we take it,” Henry explains. “There is no other way.”
Muriel’s perspective on the world changes almost immediately after she and Lee change their surroundings. She begins to meet captivating, flirtatious women who introduce Muriel to world just beyond her periphery. Sandra, played by Sandra Calle, lives close to Muriel, and Muriel meets Gail, a horseracing enthusiast, at the track. Both women allow Muriel to be curious in a way that she never knew she was allowed to be before.
In the last few years, Minahan has explored how queer people have lived in the public eye (with Netflix’s Halston) but also how sexuality is integral to survival (with last year’s underawarded Fellow Travelers). With Horses, he extends his adoration of the tragic and the beautiful even if the romance between Elordi and Calva feels underdeveloped at times. Luc Montpellier’s cinematography is absolutely exquisite. The teals, blues, and pinks transport you to a romantic past, but he matches the darkness of these characters’ psyches in how he hides and conceals with shadows. A Christmas section, later in the film, feels like it was modeled after a J.C. Leyendecker daydream.
It’s hard to escape how queer people feel frightened right now, but Minahan’s film serves a mighty purpose: to prove that queer people have always fought not to just exist but to love intensely.
On Swift Horses opens in theaters on April 25.
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